1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image formation apparatus such as copying machine or printer, a medium management system which manages a medium for use in the image formation apparatus, and so forth.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, notice is taken of a technique with which a user writes a character or depicts a picture on a special sheet of paper printed with fine dots, and he/she transfers the data of, e.g., the character written on the sheet of paper; to a personal computer, a portable telephone or the like, whereby the content can be saved or transmitted by mail. With the technique, the small dots are printed on the special sheet of paper at intervals of, for example, 0.3 mm, and they are formed so as to depict different patterns in all individual grids of predetermined size by way of example. The position of, e.g., the character written on the special sheet of paper can be specified by reading the dots with, for example, a dedicated pen which has a built-in digital camera, so that the character or the like can be utilized as electronic information.
In the related art, a document electronically stored is printed on a paper sheet which includes a position coding pattern. Also the technique employs the special paper sheet which includes the position coding pattern. The technique is such that the electronic document is printed on the paper sheet, that the printed document is manually edited using a digital pen which includes position-coding-pattern reading means, and a pen point with which a mark is put on the front surface of the paper sheet, and that the edited result is reflected on the electronic information. In the related art described above, it is also stated that the document information should desirably be printed together with the position coding pattern.
The related art described above, however, does not provide a way to associate the surfaces of a medium such as paper (herein below, termed “medium surfaces”) to each other.
As the natural act of man, a note (an annotation) on document information is sometimes made on a blank-sheet part such as the rear surface of a page printed with the document information. Nevertheless, in the technique described above, the position coding pattern is printed on only the page which is printed with the document information, and it is not printed on the blank-sheet part of, for example, the rear surface of the page. Therefore, the medium surfaces are not associated with each other, and the annotation made on the blank-sheet part is not associated with the original document either. Accordingly, there is the problem that, even when a certain electronic document has been annotated, the annotation cannot be saved in association with the corresponding electronic document and cannot be displayed to together with the corresponding electronic document.
This problem can occur not only in the set of the medium surface printed with the document information and the blank medium surface for the annotation, but also in any other set of medium surfaces.